SharePoint 2010 in Action: US Olympic Committee Press Box

SharePoint 2010 goes to the Vancouver Olympics

The US Olympic Committee recently announced a new press site built on SharePoint 2010.  The new site, USOC PressBox, demonstrates the rich image capabilities available with SharePoint 2010's native Silverlight integration.

The site demonstrates some of the other cool features of SharePoint 2010 as well. If you access the site in Firefox, you will get the same user experience as in IE since both browsers are fully supported in SharePoint 2010.  This long awaited enhancement is especially important for internet-facing sites.  Also, the Silverlight integration delivers a very compelling visual experience and the enhanced user interface means that you will see fewer page re-loads as you scroll through lists that return multiple pages of results. The site has both RSS and Twitter integration, which lets users stay on top of tweets from featured athletes - great examples of dynamic social media integration.

However, I also found some parts of the site that could use a little improvement.  If you navigate to the publications or resources pages, you'll see a familiar SharePoint list with the 2010 "check box" that allows you to act on multiple documents at one time.  Unfortunately, there's a bit of a design problem here because as a user with only read privileges, there's nothing I can do with the check box other than click it on an off - not much value and a bit confusing. 

Even though there is not much content yet, users familiar with SharePoint will see that you can sort and filter on the data columns libraries and expand and collapse the "group by" view.  I wish the designers would add a few additional metadata columns - especially an attribute to classify the publications, which cover a variety of topics including schedules, lists of records and medals, background and history information. The fact that the library has at least one classification column is good, even though it probably won't mean much to users: USOC Category.  I am assuming that the values 2010 U.S. Olympic Team Media Guide and Olympic Beat mean something to the person who created these values, but as an external user, these values don't help me much.  Moreover, with a little more than a dozen documents, it's easy to see that an additional column could help users consume the content more effectively.  A column called Topic or Document Type with even just three values as choices (Background and History, Records and Medals, and Schedules) would make the Publications library much more "consumable."  This library also exhibits a content problem that I see a lot in practice - the designers thoughtfully added a Description column so that content contributors could briefly describe the contributed documents - something I love to see because it helps users quickly scan a document list to see which documents they might need.  However, the Description is only filled in for 2 of the 14 documents posted as of February 2.  In general, it's a good practice to understand which optional metadata values contributors will commit to completing - especially on an internet site.  If fewer than 20% of the content has descriptions, it's better not to display the column in the default view until it is more fully populated - for at least half the documents.

It's great to see SharePoint 2010 on a public site - remember, the software is still in beta so it speaks a lot to the sponsor's confidence in the platform that it's being used for this purpose.  And with the application of a few information architecture best practices, the site could be an even better showcase.

• Microsoft
• SharePoint 2010